Benedictine scholars around 1700, most prominently proponents of historical criticism, have long been regarded as the spearhead of ecclesiastical learning on the brink of Enlightenment, first in France, then in Germany and other parts of Europe. Based on unpublished sources, this book is the first to contextualize this narrative in its highly complex pre-modern setting, and thus at some distance from modernist ascriptions ex posteriori. Challenged by Protestant and Catholic anti-monasticism, Benedictine scholars strove to maintain control of their intellectual tradition. They failed thoroughly, however: in the Holy Roman Empire, their success depended on an anti-Roman and nationalized reading of their research. For them, becoming part of an Enlightenment narrative meant becoming part of a cultural project of "Germany".

Anyone wishing to look beyond the paradigm of Western progress needs to understand how it came into being. In the intellectual culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, the competitive comparison of Ancients and Moderns and their respective relations to civilization and barbarism constituted one of the formative discourses. Yet alternative ideas of time and historicity are encountered not only in cultural contexts outside of Europe but also in the largely forgotten professional knowledge of the Old World: Thomism, Peripatetism, moderate forms of criticism, political theory, and legal practice. This book introduces a broad panorama of such intellectual cultures in Central Europe. It situates theological, historical, and philosophical scholarship in its institutional and epistemological environments: the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and the emerging Habsburg Monarchy. In doing so, it identifies struggles over competing pasts - Christian, ethnic, legal - as the core of those domains' intellectual development.

The close relationship between scholarship, politics and religious denomination is currently one of the major issues in research devoted to the Early Modern Age. This volume presents new routes for achieving a cultural-studies-based understanding of the European approach to history around 1700.